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Google Provides Details on ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Requests in E.U.

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Google Provides Details on ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Requests in E.U.

By Mark Scott October 9, 2014 7:00 pmOctober 9, 2014 7:00 pm

Photo

Google received approximately 143,000 requests, related to 491,000 links, to take down links in the last five months under the so-called right to be forgotten rule in Europe.Credit Britta Pedersen/European Pressphoto Agency

LONDON — Facebook, and Google’s own services, are among the websites to be most affected by Europe’s so-called right to be forgotten, according to figures Google released on Thursday.

As part of an update to its online transparency report, Google said that it had removed more links to content on Facebook from its search results than from any other site, in response to people’s requests to have links to material expunged to protect their privacy.

Two of Google’s services — YouTube and the online forum Google Groups — were also among the products most affected by such requests.

The links are being removed in response to a European privacy ruling that allows people to ask that links to information about themselves be removed from online searches unless a compelling public-interest reason exists for retaining the material.

Since the European Union’s highest court handed down its privacy decision in May, more than 3,300 links to material on Facebook have been removed. That is 1.9 percent of the 169,500 links to websites that Google has removed from its search results, according to a report by the company on Thursday.

Facebook declined to comment on the report.

A combined 4,300 links to Google’s YouTube and Groups services also have been removed, or about 2.5 percent of all the links erased.

Profile Engine, a social network based in New Zealand, and Badoo, an online dating service, were among the websites with the largest number of links removed, Google’s report said.

The New York Times and other media organizations have also been notified that links to articles have been removed from some Google search results.

The privacy ruling has pitted freedom of speech advocates like Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, against consumer advocates who argue that individuals should have the right to seek removal of links to online information about themselves.

Unlike in the United States, where the First Amendment protects freedom of speech above privacy rights, Europe places almost equal weight on people’s privacy and freedom of expression.

Google’s report offers snippets of insight about the decisions its team of legal experts has made while processing the approximately 143,000 requests, related to 491,000 links, that the company has received in the last five months.

Examples given in the report of the requests, which remain anonymous in compliance with European data protection rules, include a Swiss financial services professional who asked that links to 10 web pages outlining his conviction for financial crimes be removed. Google said it had denied the request.

Another request relates to a rape victim in Germany who asked that a link to an article about the crime be removed. Google said it had taken down the link.

While the decision in those cases would seem clear cut — there is a clear public interest in publishing information about a business professional’s financial crimes, but not in the case of a rape victim — others are more ambiguous.

These other requests include a British man who successfully asked that links to a newspaper report about his guilty plea at a local court be removed. Google said it had taken down the links, which relate to factually accurate information, because British law requires that information about convictions should not be held against individuals after a certain period of time.

The search engine’s transparency report also provides updated figures about which European countries have submitted the most privacy requests.

The right-to-be-forgotten decision allows anyone based in Europe — and potentially those elsewhere — to submit requests to Google. If their submissions are successful, the links will not appear in search results on the company’s services with European domains, but they will remain open to search on global sites like Google.com.

People in France have made roughly 28,500 requests, the largest number of any European country, according to Google’s report. Individuals in Germany and Britain, two of Europe’s most populous countries, submitted the second- and third-largest numbers of requests.

Some countries have more successful requests than others. In Italy, for example, about three-quarters of the submissions have been rejected, according to the report. By contrast, more than half of the submissions from Germany so far have been approved.

A version of this article appears in print on 10/10/2014, on page B3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Facebook Leads in Links Erased by Google in E.U..